January 2005

(another story on subject)

Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and Philips are teaming up with Digital Rights Management specialist Intertrust Technologies with plans to launch their own DRM standards in competition with Apple and Microsoft.

A group of four major Consumer Electronics companies have formed a joint venture called the Marlin Joint Development Association to tackle the industry’s ongoing anti-piracy and copy protection problems.

Any scheme released by the group will work in concert with technologies developed by another industry group, the Coral Consortium, which is developing ways to ensure that different DRM standards are interoperable.

Both the Marlin and Coral initiatives are sponsored by the same five vendors, although the latter also includes HP and Twentieth Century Fox as major promoters.

The two initiatives are part of the consumer electronics industry’s attempt to neutralise two existing proprietary DRM schemas for digital content that currently dominate. Apple and Microsoft each have different and incompatible DRM standards in wide circulation and in the case of Apple at least, they are loath to let anybody else get access to them. Microsoft has been far more open with its technology than Apple, in the hopes of earning a quid from the prospect of future licensing revenues.

Apple, for its part has been extremely proprietary with its system, which has angered some users of its famously successful iPod player and iTunes music stores. To date it has only given one other company, PC vendor Hewlett Packard access to the technology.

Neither Apple nor Microsoft are part of either group.

If the CE vendors can come up with a workable DRM solution that satisfies both end-users and content providers, the four companies could save themselves considerable money in licensing fees as the digital content era become ubiquitous.

The group hopes to come up with a solution that will run on a variety of form factors from mobile phones, personal media players and set top box style devices like PVRs. The likely solution will be another layer added to an existing format like AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) or MPEG. Though they are some years behind in development terms, the unit shipments of these four major vendors combined could quickly add critical mass to any standards developed and the plans to make the source code readily available will assist other manufacturers to adopt the technology quickly.